Playgrounds are well known in the art. Generally, playgrounds are recognized as areas where children, and sometimes adults, can gather to meet others and play various games. Most playgrounds include a playset with a number of pieces of playground equipment.
Some common types of playground equipment include:
1) Swings;
2) Slides;
3) Rotating Carousels;
4) See Saws;
5) Rockers;
6) Climbing Walls;
7) Climbing Nets;
8) Climbing Platforms;
9) Poles;
10) Sand boxes.
While minor changes have been made to the design and implementation of the major types of playground equipment, there has been little change in the operation of playground equipment in many years. In particular, there has been little effort to combine classic playground equipment with modern technology, such as the Internet. Accordingly, a need exists for more technologically advanced playground equipment that incorporates modern technology.
Augmented reality technology has existed since the 1990s. Generally, an augmented reality system comprises a smart device, such as a smartphone or tablet computer, which incorporates a camera, display, GPS receiver, and Internet connection. An application running on the smart device operates the device's camera to capture an image in real time, which is displayed on the display. The application also operates the GPS receiver to determine the device's location, and in some implementations, also determines the facing of the device, which may require using a gyroscope in the device. The application uses this information to access augmented reality information through the Internet connection, which is displayed over the camera image on the display.
Typical uses of augmented reality include the display of advertisements on the display, such as special deals that augmented reality users can see while shopping, as well as other types of information, such as the history of a statue in a city. The use of avatar's in augmented reality applications to represent players of a game, for example, has been used in the prior art. However, the use of avatars in specific and augmented reality in general, has been used primarily to display static information.
Accordingly, there exists a need to utilize more dynamic augmented reality systems.